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The trade war between the United States and Canada—more exactly between the American government and the Canadian government(s)—helps illustrate the opposition between two regimes: free trade between individuals or private organizations, which creates mutual gains and favors peaceful relations; trade between governments or directed by them, that is, mercantilism, which generates conflicts and hatred. After .. MORE
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Free Markets
Gerard Comeau beer. Photo by the author CBC Radio has a great report on what we can learn from the Supreme Court of Canada case R. v. Comeau, popularly known up here as the “Free the Beer” case. In 2012, Gerard Comeau loaded his car with beer (and whiskey and liquor) in Quebec and headed .. MORE
Social Security
I’ve run two installments from the Social Security chapter of my book The Joy of Freedom: An Economist’s Odyssey. Installment one was “Social Security is a Ponzi Scheme,” March 11, 2025. Installment two was “Flawed from the Start and Ponzi versus Stocks,” March 14, 2025.. Here’s the final installment. Of course, all the numbers .. MORE
Finance: stocks, options, etc.
I see two problems with the term “correction”. Yes, there is a sense in which any change in market prices is a “correction”, as with new information the previous price becomes inappropriate. But that’s equally true of an increase or a decrease in market prices. In contrast, the term market correction tends to be used .. MORE
Economics of Health Care
Government Goons Destroy Tree House by Autumn Billings, Reason, March 12, 2025. Excerpt: Bringing the tree house into compliance was no simple task. Polizzi tells Reason that while he had secured the necessary zoning permit for the tree house—a feat in and of itself—he’d been unable to obtain a building permit from the L.A. Department of .. MORE
Economic and Political Philosophy
If someone external to your group wants to invest in a certain territory encompassing you, your group’s permission should be required. The argument seems obvious. It is nearly by definition that when we make a decision collectively, the individual must submit. The individual is just one but the collective is more than one. Or so .. MORE
Austrian Economics
A body of literature called the New History of Capitalism argues (incorrectly, I believe) that Western prosperity is built on legacies of exploitation like colonialism and slavery. Economists are very skeptical because the New Historians of Capitalism rest much of their case on fundamental misunderstandings of basic economic concepts like national income accounting. Economists have .. MORE
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Browse our archive of posts by author last nameAustrian Economics
A body of literature called the New History of Capitalism argues (incorrectly, I believe) that Western prosperity is built on legacies of exploitation like colonialism and slavery. Economists are very skeptical because the New Historians of Capitalism rest much of their case on fundamental misunderstandings of basic economic concepts like national income accounting. Economists have .. MORE
Economics of Health Care
Government Goons Destroy Tree House by Autumn Billings, Reason, March 12, 2025. Excerpt: Bringing the tree house into compliance was no simple task. Polizzi tells Reason that while he had secured the necessary zoning permit for the tree house—a feat in and of itself—he’d been unable to obtain a building permit from the L.A. Department of .. MORE
#ReadWithMe
In my last post, I described what R. R. Reno sees as the social consequences of banishing the strong gods. In this post, I’ll look at what Reno sees as the political results. By Reno’s reckoning, many of the destabilizing political consequences of the banishing of the strong gods were kept at bay by the .. MORE
Experiments consistently reveal that our moral judgments are driven by perceptions of harm. We condemn acts based on how much they seem to victimize someone vulnerable. —Kurt Gray, Outraged: Why We Fight About Morality and Politics and How to Find Common Ground1 (page 8) In his book, Outraged, Kurt Gray studies the psychology of moral .. MORE
A Liberty Classics Book Review of What Should Economists Do? by James M. Buchanan.1 In November 1963, James Buchanan–newly president at the 33rd meeting of the Southern Economic Association–gave a stirring and surprising address titled “What Should Economists Do?”2 It was immediately published in the January 1964 issue of the Southern Economic Journal. The address .. MORE
A Book Review of The Road to Freedom: Economics and the Good Society, by Joseph E. Stiglitz.1 Introduction Columbia University economics professor Joseph E. Stiglitz has recently published a book titled The Road to Freedom: Economics and the Good Society. In it, Stiglitz, who shared the 2001 Nobel Prize in economics with George Akerlof and .. MORE
A Book Review of Animal Spirits: The American Pursuit of Vitality from Camp Meeting to Wall Street, by Jackson Lears.1 When Alexis de Tocqueville visited the young American republic in the early 1830s, he immediately noticed a deep restlessness which characterized the Americans that he encountered. In the America witnessed by Tocqueville, … a man .. MORE
GST is a VAT, so everyone pays taxes to their vendors and collects from their buyers and submits reports accounting for the difference (which is what is payable). PSTs may or may not be VATs..
BS, March 15